SAS Graphics Accelerator Allows Blind People to See Graphs.

March 20, 20175:12 pm

The SAS Graphics Accelerator is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets blind people discover and explore graphics in a variety of ways. First, you are notified by a distinctive sound that graphs are present on the webpage. Next, you can choose to get a description of the graph that will be read by your screen reader, or you can convert the graph into an easy to read table, or you can get a sonic representation of the graph. The sonic representation travels along the X-axis; data points that are higher on the Y-axis will have a higher pitch sound than data points that are lower on the Y-axis. Watch the video below for a demonstration of these features.
SAS Graphics Accelerator is free to install. It works with most major screen readers on PC and Mac.

From the Developer

SAS Graphics Accelerator allows users with visual impairments to access data visualization on their terms. It enables alternative presentations of SAS data visualizations that have been created with the necessary metadata. Alternative presentations include text descriptions, tabular data, and interactive sonification. Sonification uses non-speech audio to convey important information about the graph.
Students can use SAS Graphics Accelerator in conjunction with SAS University Edition, which provides free access to SAS software.
The most recent release is SAS Graphics Accelerator 1.5.

SAS Graphics Accelerator 1.5 includes these features:

Support has been added for localized content within graphs. Note that the SAS Graphics Accelerator user interface is English only.

Bar charts, time series plots, heat maps, line charts, scatter plots, and histograms can be explored interactively using sound.

About James Oates

James Oates officially joined the Cool Blind Tech podcast team in the summer of 2014. James is an advocate of accessible technology across all platforms, with an emphasis on Windows. As a former K-12 educator, James brings his passion for teaching to the CBT audience in an effort to help listeners realize their potential and explore new avenues of empowerment through technology. Blind since childhood, James currently lives in Florida.
You can follow him on Twitter, @BLIND_MATRIX